alessandroSkyrim lead designer says Bethesda can't just switch engines because the current one is "perfectly tuned" to make the studio's RPGs
geekwithsoulSounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”
ARkPerfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.
Mediocre fun crap, please.
Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.
RQGPerfectly tuned is not the right environment for creativity.
It makes sense. It would be pretty costly to train everyone there on a new engine and tweak the new engine enough to play nice with the kind of games they want to make.
I mean it is, but it might be less costly than continuing on the proprietary engine. CD Projekt and Halo both cut their losses and moved to UE5 as a compromise moving forward .
If CD Projekt, creators of one of the best RPGs of the last 20 years, thinks they can benefit from an engine switch I’m inclined to think they might be right.
Skyrim is a better RPG than anything CDPR made, and Skyrim isn’t a good RPG.
As long as you aware that’s an unpopular opinion, then it’s yours to have.
Not better, but they are different kinds or RPG.
Both are open world action RPGs yes, but CDPR makes highly story driven games when Bethesda makes sandbox style RPGs where the story is only framing all the mechanics and possibilities.
In Bethesda games I can roleplay my characters, in The Witcher I can roleplay as Gerald.
The problem with Halo is thay 343 didn’t keep a lot of the people that actually knew how to use the Blam/Slipspace engine. They didn’t want Bungie employees working there. So of course they were going to switch to Unreal. Now Halo is going to have the same bad performance problems all the othe r games that use Unreal have been having lately.
A big benefit of using a proprietary game engine is that the development studio does not need to pay a yearly fee per person for a game engine license every year that a game is in development. That gets very expensive very quickly. Both 343 and CD Projekt have a lot more money behind them now than they did 10 years ago, so they must think the huge financial loss is somehow going to please investors. Because at the end of the day, for both companies its all about pleasing the investors, not gamers.
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
counterpoint: if it isn't the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i'm not counting "let's just copy what we designed last time" as design), and that's worse
CALIGVLAthen everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn't care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would've been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn't seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can't cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it's still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Starfields core gameplay is actually leagues more refined then prior games on the same engine, feels really good to play, where it lacks heavily is story, which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay.
which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay
you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting
Elder Scrolls lore is pretty cool, they’ve never been AMAZING stories, but there’s enough there to RP and make decisions and such that have some kind of impact.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they’ve been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check Vehicles? Check Skills? Check Online? Why not? Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it Story? Anything goes, it doesn’t need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.
And it doesn’t even interact with anything else!
You can either get materials by setting up a bunch of outposts which is a complete drag or buying them at like one shop in Akila City.
It’s like they saw they had that in Fallout 4 and 76, ported it over and then remembered that you can’t scrap random junk to get the materials.
It’s not even used for ship upgrades. Why does it even exist???
josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he's worked with, which is probably why they're reluctant to give it up
but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn't try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn't let them...which is more or less the same story as every other time they've tried to break out of the mold they've carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.
whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they're always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.
The thing that gets me is having the interior of the ships. But that interior doesn’t matter. And if you try to actually RP in your RPG you inevitably get plopped on an airless planet without a suit because of the ship fast travel mechanic. The entire section of stuff there is a complete useless doodad that could be replaced with small cutscenes or static scenes to talk with onboard crew and use upgraded ship things like research stations.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆I think they (and by that I mean management) just don’t want to spend the time getting the developers themselves up to speed on a new system. They’ve used the current one for so damn long, they likely based all scheduling on the fact that most of the people working there know it inside and out.
They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already and don’t want to start over.
They've probably also put considerable work into the next project already
fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then
you're right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then
Altima NEOPeople wanted them to switch to a new engine for Skyrim. They claimed they were using a new engine, but it was the same old pig with makeup.
Yes, and Unreal Engine 5 is still the same old pig with makeup Unreal 1 Engine from decades past.
Same logic
shnizmuffinThe train in fallout 3 was just a guy with a train for a head running along a track
That may bd silly to think about but it worked.
ripcordHey, if it works it works.
But pretty damn hilarious.
Perfectly tuned my bubbley ass bro
Just give this over two decades old crypt of an engine up already
FragrantOwlI get that.
My wallet is perfectly tuned to buy games from other studios.
The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices
the writing, yes
but if their engine is "perfectly tuned" then that means their engine is informing their design
they can't make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine
they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine
Maybe that’s why Starfield has become a 50% game, 50% loading screen.
I think that’s a reach - the difference between boring choices and interesting ones isn’t the engine - look at New Vegas and Daggerfall.
I Cast FistIt’s the writing and the design choices
I blame Emil Pagliarulo first and foremost. “Design docs? HAHA, that’s for losers!” He’s also the lead writer and no doubt the asshole behind space magic in the game, since he couldn’t put radiation witches in FO4.
They just dont want to invest the time to overhaul the engine or start from scratch. Even Call of Duty managed to do this.
“Even one of the largest and most well funded game franchises in history did this”
Elder Scrolls probably fits this category as well - not as much as Call of Duty but Bethesda probably has the best RPG sales of anyone.
Yeah, because Microsoft/ZeniMax/Bethesda is such a small corporation and Fallout/The Elder Scrolls is such an inconsequential, low budget franchise.
Have they played their own games?
Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I’d say they are far from “perfectly tuned.” Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
DippyIt was 10 years into playing Skyrim on my 4th medium of playing it that learned the courier wasn’t supposed to be naked. I thought it was a comment on his poverty or something
Got something to deliver. Your hands only.
Man, this sounds wildly different picturing him naked.
I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.
Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!
So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.
Starfield…?
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
I would have said “that terminator game they made in the early 90s” but that is hardly an RPG :)
I don’t recall Arena having many patches, but since there wasn’t a great way to distribute patches back then, they probably had no choice but to get their shit at least mostly stable before shipping.
“Memory list blown” was my constant companion 😫
TrickDacyFrom experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Ricky RigatoniIt’s still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
People said that but I played the game I’m sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.
People remember Skyrim bugs because they’re funny.
Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
Zelda TOTK?
Admittedly haven’t played it yet, but BOTW was absolutely a masterpiece.
That said, the NPC scripting and interactions are way simpler than Bethesda games, and there’s very little in terms of even marginally open ended quests. It’s a great open world, but it’s pretty on rails story wise outside the order in which you tackled areas.
How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.
GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.
I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.
DonebrachNo one forgets that—the artwork for Roach’s Gwent card has her ON A ROOF.